Udder Chaos

Like many people, I commute to work. Technically speaking, I'm a reverse commuter, since I live in a city and I commute to a rural area for work. Normally this works well for me, since most of the traffic is travelling in the opposite direction. Most of the human traffic, that is.

Just the other day I was forced to come to a rather abrupt halt on the highway going through the middle of nowhere (actually it was in Alberry Plains, which is much the same thing). A group of cattle, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, came stampeding down a side road and unto the highway. There was no farmer in sight. For that matter, there's no barn to be seen in the area either, just a few houses, which left me wondering where these errant cows had come from.

Of course, wondering from whence came the kine was hardly my biggest concern. I was much more worried about where they were going. I'm not sure that fifteen cows precisely qualify as a stampede, but I wasn't about to run this bovine gauntlet, not in a Honda Civic. I had been to an appointment earlier that morning, so I was already running late for work. Waiting for the road to be clear of cattle wasn't going to make me any earlier. And these cows didn't seem to know what they wanted to do. There was a fence on the opposite side of the road, so they couldn't go across, and there wasn't exactly much for them to do out on the highway, unless they decided to head for Poole's Corner. So they milled around like so many four-legged teenagers.

As I waited for the cows to figure out where they were going next, I starting to ponder if there was anyone I could possibly call for help in this situation. Somehow I didn't think that the operators at 911 were going to have anyone relevant to take my call. Around this point two things happened, however, which ultimately made this all meaningless. First, one of the cows decided that it was good idea to turn around and head back down the side road, and the others all followed. Second, I remembered that my new phone has a camera, and how often do you get a chance to snap a photo of road cows? Before I could get set to take the shot, however, the cattle were already on their way. All that I could have managed to catch would have been 15 bovine rear ends, and that's a photo we can all live without.

The funniest part is that this isn't even the first time this has happened to me. A couple years ago I was carpooling (technically, minivan pooling) with two coworkers when we encountered three cows on the side of the road (a different road entirely), about halfway between a pasture and a cornfield. It didn't take a lot of effort to figure out their origin and destination. We ended up calling the police, figuring maybe they could get in touch with one of the farmers in question.

The other time I was by myself, and was stopped by someone who was helping move a herd of cattle from one field to another. This involved stopping traffic from both directions and running the cows a few hundred feet along the side of the highway. It's a bit unusual to see a short-distance cattle drive in Lower Montague, but not especially disturbing.

So the next time you find yourself stuck in rush hour traffic, take a moment to be thankful that you don't also have to contend with stray farm animals. The again, considering that Bos taurus is not known for road rage, is unlikely to carjack you, and physically can't squeegee your windows for spare change, maybe dealing with a few cows on the road now and then isn't so bad.